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Fried Oyster Crabs
Wash and dry about one and one-half pints of oyster crabs, dip them first in flour, and then in cold milk, and finally in cracker dust or well sifted breadcrumbs. Shake them up well in a colander, and fry in hot fat for two or three minutes. Serve in croustades made of short paste, garnish with parsley, and sprinkle a little salt over before serving.
Stewed Oyster Crabs, Poulette Style Remove all the meat from a pint and a half of oyster crabs, put it into a saucepan, pouring on a little of their liquor, and add to this one ounce of butter, pepper and salt; parboil for three or four minutes, add carefully one breakfast cupful of Hollandaise sauce, stew for two or three minutes longer, but do not boil, add the juice of half a lemon and one teaspoonful of finely chopped parsley; stir gently, and it will then be ready for use.
Two preparations of oyster crabs run together in one entry. The frying method is straightforward; the difficulty is entirely in sourcing the main ingredient.
- What an oyster crab isPinnotheres ostreum, the pea crab, a soft-shelled commensal that lives inside the mantle of a living oyster. They are eaten whole, shell and all, and are rarely sold today except by specialist shuckers who save them; expect to negotiate with an oyster house rather than a fish counter.
- "Remove all the meat"The wording is loose, since there is nothing to pick out of a creature the size of a pea. It most likely means separating the crabs from the shucked oysters and any grit, reserving a little of the liquor.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe says only "hot fat" and gives no figure; two or three minutes is a long time for something this small, so watch them rather than trusting the clock.
- Cracker dustFinely rolled dry soda or water crackers. Panko is too coarse for a crab the size of a fingernail; use fine dry breadcrumbs or crushed saltines sifted through a sieve.
- Croustades of short pasteSmall baked pastry cases, blind-baked from ordinary shortcrust and filled at the last moment. Barquettes or tartlet shells do the same job.
- Breakfast cupfulAbout 8 to 10 fl oz. For hollandaise that is a generous quantity against a pint and a half of crabs, and the sauce should coat rather than swamp.
- The hinge in the stewed version"Do not boil" governs everything after the hollandaise goes in. The sauce is an egg-yolk emulsion and will break at a simmer; hold it just below a tremble and add the lemon off the heat.
Oyster crabs were a genuine luxury of the American Atlantic coast in the late nineteenth century, tied closely to the New York oyster trade. Because an oyster yields at best one or two tiny crabs, a pint and a half represents a very large number of oysters opened, which is why the dish belonged to kitchens shucking in quantity rather than to home cooks. The poulette designation is loose here: a classical sauce poulette is a veloute-based sauce finished with egg yolks, lemon and parsley, and hollandaise has simply been substituted while the lemon and parsley are kept. Oyster crabs became scarce on menus as the great beds of New York Harbor and the Chesapeake declined through the twentieth century, and they survive now mostly as a shucker's perquisite.